American agriculture appears to be wilting in the heat of inflation and the drought of sound economic policy under the Biden-Harris administration, some farmers told Fox News Digital in recent interviews.
“Within the agriculture sector, we’re in a recession right now,” Brent Johnson, a farmer and president of the Iowa Farm Bureau, said over the weekend.
“We’ve seen a lot of job losses. We’re seeing negative balance sheets. It’s become very challenging.”
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Soaring costs are crippling farmers while the international market for American-grown food has slowed to a crawl “with no new trade deals” under the current administration, said Johnson.
“It doesn’t take somebody with a PhD to figure out that the math isn’t working and that we’ve got to do something to offset what’s been going on,” John Boyd, a Virginia farmer and founder of the National Black Farmers Association in Virginia, said in a phone interview.
John Wesley Boyd Jr. at his farm in Baskerville, Virginia. Boyd is president and founder of the National Black Farmers Association. “We’ve got to do something to offset what’s been going on,” he said. (Matt McClain for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
“We’re paying $5 a gallon for diesel and it was probably somewhere around $2 a gallon five years ago,” he said.
“All of these costs have gone through the roof, all the input costs — but the prices for corn and soybeans are down.”
Fertilizer, seed, feed, diesel and labor costs, said Boyd, have doubled since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were sworn into office in Jan. 2021.
The economics “make it very difficult to stay alive.”
Harris now tops the Democratic ticket, with running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, in the race to control the White House against Republican challenger and former President Donald Trump plus Sen. JD Vance — and Trump has said on the campaign trail he will cancel every Biden administration policy that he described as “brutalizing our farmers” within hours of taking office if elected in November.
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Boyd added that the economics “make it very difficult to stay alive. And then you have an administration that hasn’t been aggressive in helping us.”
Boyd himself was instrumental in getting the administration to release $2 billion in direct assistance to Black and other minority owners from groups that suffered discrimination over the years in federal farm programs.
Trump has said on the campaign trail he will cancel every Biden administration policy that he described as “brutalizing our farmers” within hours of taking office if he’s elected in November. (iStock)
“Today’s action will enable more farmers and ranchers to support themselves and their families, help grow the economy and pursue their dreams,” the White House said in a July 31 statement about its most high-profile effort to aid farm owners.
Even so, said Boyd, “we’re struggling — and we’ve been losing farmers across the country, too.”
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About 6,000 farms closed in 2023 alone, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, though it is part of a larger trend dating back decades.
The troubles today, however, run deeper than just the basics of a business balance sheet.
Aging population of farmers
“You know that when farms go out of business,” said Boyd, “there are not a lot of young people replacing those numbers.”
An aging population of farmers is just one of the major issues that drove the recent formation of the Nebraska Farmers Network.
A farmer uses a barn to show support for Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump on August 10, 2024, near Charles City, Iowa. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
“A whole generation of Nebraska farmers and ranchers have a median age of 56.9 years old, and the average age of a Nebraska landowner is 67 years old,” the group states on its website.
The pool of farmers dwindled decades ago when young adults, now in middle age, saw college as a better opportunity than working in the family agriculture business.
“It doesn’t take somebody with a PhD to figure out that the math isn’t working.”
“We skipped a whole generation of farmers,” Nebraska Farmers Network co-founder Gabe Sanchez told Fox News Digital.
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Younger adults now believe that a college education isn’t worth the investment.
“There are now plenty of young people willing to do the work,” Sanchez said. “What they’ve lost is the land to farm.”
Minnesota Gov. and now 2024 vice presidential candidate Tim Walz is shown campaigning at Farmest in Morgan, Minnesota, in 2018 while running for governor as the candidate from the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. (Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune via Getty Images)
The Nebraska Farmers Network began operation last year as a grassroots movement to battle other major issues fueling the farm crisis. Its members argue those are the failures of big government and the greed, and potential threat, of global investment.
A consortium of interests, including foreign nations such as China, Saudi Arabia and even Canada, plus uber-wealthy investors like Bill Gates, have gobbled up millions of acres of farmland around the country, said Sanchez.
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“They just see land as an investment and not for its production value,” he said.
Those non-agricultural investments in the world’s most productive soil lead to higher taxes, which make it even tougher to turn a profit and are pricing farmland out of the reach of, well, farmers.
“Farmers already operate on a slim margin and that margin is slipping away,” said Sanchez.
A tractor with combine on farm field and chimney rock, Scotts Bluff National Monument, in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. (Hawk Buckman/Design Pics Editorial/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Negligent government, he said, is a big part of the problem.
“These outside entities are skirting vague and loosely enforced federal and state laws prohibiting foreign investment,” said Sanchez.
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“And nobody’s doing anything about it.”
Farming’s future
The widespread crisis in farming is causing a historically heavy Democratic voting bloc to consider another option, said Boyd of the National Black Farmers Association.
“My demographic group has historically voted all Democrat,” said Boyd. “Maybe 90% or more Democrat.”
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He added, “But I don’t know if it’s going to be that way going forward. The Trump campaign has a chance to make a play here and I think they need to do it more aggressively.”
He said he’s hoping to hear plans for farming’s future from both campaigns.
“We’re all facing trouble.”
Sanchez said Nebraska farmers are solidly voting for Trump.
He fears all the foreign investment might be about more than just a desire to make money in real estate and demands a more aggressive defense of American farmers and farmland should Trump win back the Oval Office.
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“Henry Kissinger once said that if you control the food, you control the people,” said Sanchez.
Boyd said whoever’s in office needs to do right by American farmers.
“We’re the greatest country in the world, man, and that country was built off the backs of farmers,” he said.
“The whole infrastructure of this country was built off farmers. And we’re all facing trouble. The numbers right now just aren’t adding up.”